Such an apparatus has a braking device upstream of the stacking region and acts on each of the trailing edges of the sheet as they are fed in, and at least one supporting bar that extends above the travel plane in the stacking region and has nozzles from which compressed air exits.
An apparatus of this type is described in WO 1994/025384 [U.S. Pat. No. 5,611,529]. Apparatuses of this type are used for stacking sheets downstream of machines with continuous transport of individual sheets, such as cross-cutting machines or printing presses. In a first step, they produce an overlapped stream from the sheets conveyed in one after another, which overlapped stream is subsequently deposited in a stack. Here, the length of the sheets usually deposited on pallets can be considerably greater than the sheet width and can be 1 m and more.
The apparatus described in WO 1994/025384 is of very compact construction. Its length between the braking device and the start of the stacking region is less than the maximum sheet length that can be processed.